THE New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 1883.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XX, Issue 6636, 23 February 1883, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 1883.

Ik regard to the Land Question in Great Britain, we see by the Queen's speech at the opening of Parliament that Ministers propose a measure " to provide for compensation of tenants in England and Scotland for improvements made upon leasehold lands." The measure is good for what it touches, but it does not touch what is pressing in the situation now. No doubt if the measure should include a retrospective effect it will be a boon to many emigrating farmers, but it is not easy to see how it will have any influence in. checking that disappearance more and more of the rural population, -which is the thing complained of by those who look ahead, as creating for the future the gravest of national

dangers. But British farmers have never been an agitating body, and the agitation is confined to one or two exceptionally poor districts. In past times the rural magnates led the counties; and now, •when the farmers are discontented, and they and the landlords are no longer in the same boat, they are hopeless or careless of agitation, and prefer to emigrate. And the habit of emigration, not long begun, is rapidly spreading among them. Very lucky it is for the new countries which catch them. They have been among all classes the backbone of their own country; they were in the historical days the sturdy, substantial yeomanry of which their natioivs history is so proud. And with their sterling qualities of industry and energy, with their money capital, which they do not wish to lose in a now unpromising struggle at home, and with the improved skill remarkable in British agriculture of late years, they constitute a specially valuable class either to lay sure the foundations or assist the development of a colony. They are now betaking them selves almost exclusively to the United States and to Manitoba, just because of the vigorous efforts made to draw them there—efforts which, as regards Manitoba, the Times has backed up, with scant allusion to its long winters and limited circle of agricultural opportunities. Of course, an important share of this valuable emigration could be secured by similar active management for New Zealand, with its more attractive climate and other natural

advantages. But if their emigration is a good thing for the country they go to, it is a bad thing for their own to lose them. It is a bad thing for Great Britain, that -while there is an enormous increase of her population it should be confined to the towns and manufacturing districts, —that in many of the rural parts the population has long been decreasing, and that a further and greatly extended removal is in prospect in all. The labourers have long been departing to the neighbouring towns ; the farmers are now departing over sea. The repeal of the Corn Laws, which precipitated this state of things, could not have done so but for the peculiar land arrangements. To repeal the Cora Laws was necessary. England, with wide fields of coal, iron, and other minerals beyond any other European land, and with ports for shipment close by, could not but become in time a great manufacturing country, and in process of time she became so. Then to feed the millions engaged in manufacture and commerce, it was requisite to cheapen food, to let in foreign supplies. But it fell with tremendous severity on the rural interest, which could not stand a cheapening of its produce, because in England the land has to vield three " profits/' while now almost anywhere else only one or two are required. The land lias to support, with whatever amount or absence of profit, three different classes—the landlord, the farmer, and the labourer. The " profit " of the last-mentioned is a very technical phrase indeed, inflsmucli as for too many years past it is represented by bread and cheese while lie is able to work, and at the end of that the workhouse. No wonder he prefers to exchange the fresh air of the country for the better wages of the crowded city or stilling factory The fanners' profit is likewise illusionary. lie does not get interest on his capital, and he fears the loss of the principal by continuing the; prer.ent struggle. No wonder he should seek the emigrant ship. The matter is gradually settling itself, and indeed under the present land system there is only one way of settling it. The landlord must take his estate into his own hands—if his lands be good turn them into pasture, if of poor quality turn them into game preserves. Indeed, in some quarters this he lias already long been doing. Then the land will pay, because one of the "three profits" required will be got rid of, one of the three classes it has

to provide for now would clear ofF bodily. This is what things are widely tending to, for under the existing system nothing else will pay, and Lord Derby, one of the most liberal of landlords, has declared that the best and only course for the farmers is to emigrate. Tt is all right from the landlord's point of view—but -what about the national point of view 1 From that standpoint it cannot be auspicious to have the pleasant lields and quiet villages depopulated—to have thai rural life disappear whi;h gives to a nation its bone and sinew, and rears to manhood generations of youth uncontaminated by the vices of cities—to find no country people except an occasional herd or gamekeeper, and have the nation composed of ricketty factory hands and asthmatic townsmen. That is not a bright or a beautiful look-out. The question will finally settle itself in this way, which would suit the land-

lords alone, unless it is settled in. another way to suit the nation—by gradually buying up from the landlords wide sections of their land, on which to permanently root a rural population by means of a peasant proprietary. On this plan the State would buy up the land, to be repaid over a fixed term of years by the people it would settle, who would be tenants of the State until the purchase money was repaid and I then become owners. The State before I now has advanced greater sums of money fer very diti'erent and u lire productive objects. An enormous debt, what is known as the " National T>ebt," was run up in subsidies to foreign Governments to help them to put armies in the iield against Bonaparte—a thing which the foreign Governments might have contrived means to do themselves if John Bull had not been so vr-rv obliging. This method of establishing a rural population has been urged by John Stuart Mill, by Herbert Spencer, by George I Jacob Holyoake, the chief mover of the English co-operative, movement, by the writers in the Westminster Review, by the writers in the Spectator. But nothing has yet come of it, and a land system which has ceased on the European Continent continues in England. On the proposed plan the landlords would be compensated for their lands—what the State would require it would buy from them. Why, then, should they not be agreeable ? I Because they attach another value to the land besides the money vaiue. In England no position is so valued as that of a great landed proprietor. And they are able to shelve the change because they have Parliament with them —not only the House of Lords, but the House of Commons, which is mainly composed of three bodies—the hereditary proprietors, the manufacturing and city men who aspire to become so, and the many other men who, one way or other, are interested in the continuance of the existing system. So Mr. Gladstone, who would fain take up the question, only introduces a Bill which does not touch it, and which any Tory Ministry might as readily introduce just now as a pacifier.

Whether there are to be extended supplies of home-raised meat by the landlords working their estates themselves, or revived supplies of homeraised breadstuff's by a peasant proprietary, in either ease supplies from without will always continue to be needed—because London with its suburbs contains already five millions of people ; because Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, if we include the towns which are their suburbs, are each running up to a million : because there is a score of other towns each with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, and a hundred lesser towns which would rank as of magnitude in any other country ; and because there are colliery districts, other mining district?, pottery districts, so densely peopled as to resemble vast outstretched cities. Such immense hives of population will always need to be fed from without as well as within. The question now pressing on England is whether she is to retain any considerable rural population as the country's backbone, and it is a question which the public will soon take up as the chief of all. But as English farmers are now emigrating in

fast-increasing numbers, the question for New Zealand is to secure her share of this emigration of a pre-eminently valuable class.